* When using Wayland, until VERY recently (latest nvidia drivers), the entire system would freeze when hooking up an external monitor. Okay, no problem I’ll use X.
* Hygrid graphics just completely doesn’t work, loads of glitches, glacially slow framerates on external monitors, etc. Okay, I turn off hybrid graphics in the BIOS, but that absolutely trashes battery life.
* X does not let you run different scale factors concurrently. You can’t set your laptop screen to 2x and your external monitor to 1x. Wayland does let you, but see above.
* I have two 4K monitors hooked up to my laptop. Whenever I resume from sleep, there’s a very good chance that only one or zero of the monitors is detected. They both power on, but only one (or sometimes none) of them actually has a signal. Cycling power on the monitor usually fixes the issue. My coworker has a Thinkpad from the same line but a generation earlier, and it had the exact same problem, so this has apparently been around a while and still isn’t fixed.
Well, that's your first problem. How does FreeBSD or OSX do on it? Maybe you should buy a Linux laptop to run Linux instead of slapping Linux on a Windows laptop and expecting it to work correctly.
Try Intel or AMD; they are a lot more stable in my experience.
Yes, but only since very recently — AFAIK, most distros are not using the open-source drivers yet, as they don’t yet have feature parity with the proprietary ones.
umanwizard's reply is interesting.
Also - I have been using Linux for 26 years, if that matters. However, on the desktop I largely moved to macOS (then called OS X) in 2003.